


Survival (Fly Remix.)

by pamymex3girl



Category: Battlestar Galactica (2003)
Genre: Gen
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2014-05-10
Updated: 2014-05-10
Packaged: 2018-01-24 07:02:57
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,000
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/1595897
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/pamymex3girl/pseuds/pamymex3girl
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>One day Lee stands before them and thinks "You're all already dead, whatever I tell you right now won't matter, because you're already dead."</p>
            </blockquote>





	Survival (Fly Remix.)

**Author's Note:**

  * Inspired by [Fly](https://archiveofourown.org/works/86217) by [ishafel](https://archiveofourown.org/users/ishafel/pseuds/ishafel). 
  * In response to a prompt by [ishafel](https://archiveofourown.org/users/ishafel/pseuds/ishafel) in the [remixmadness2014](https://archiveofourown.org/collections/remixmadness2014) collection. 



> Disclaimer: I don't own anything. Battlestar Galacitca belongs to it's owners, and the original story of this idea of course belongs to the original author.

When you go out there, pretend like you’re already dead.

That is, at least, what Kara teaches all their new recruits – not that there are many, but considering the whole world has ended, Lee is happy with anyone they can get. What Kara says makes sense; of course it does, because if they’re dead than fear won’t harm them, they won’t freeze up when the Cylon’s appear because they’re already dead, so nothing can harm them anymore. (He’s never actually been sure whether they really manage to convince themselves they are dead but so far nobody has frozen up so he figures it actually works.) What they don’t tell the new recruits, what they’ll figure out for themselves, is that it never ends, it goes on forever, they might survive this one fight but there’s always another one just around the corner and one day they’ll all be gone.

And he, their commanding officer, sends them off, time after time, with a simple _Good Hunting_ and a smile.

(But then even that smile fades away, because nothing really changes.)

One fateful day, he’s not sure which one, he stands before them, right before they fly out, and he thinks: “You’re all already dead, whatever I tell you right now won’t matter, because you’re already dead.”

If he thinks that, if he convinces himself of that, it will be easier to send them all of to their dead.

Maybe it’s wrong to think that way, disturbing even, but he’s the one who has to send them off, this is his duty, so really what does it matter how he thinks about them? Because it doesn’t matter, none of it ever will.

They’re all dead anyway.

*~*

In his first year in flight school – not that long ago and yet it feels like it all happened to somebody else, a long time ago – Lee read ‘The history of the first Cylon war’ by Admiral Ngala.

Not by choice – of course not, he thinks, that damn book was incredibly long and boring and, in all honesty, he’d felt he had far more important things to do with his time than read it. (Now that the attacks have happened and the colonies have been destroyed, he’s kind of glad he read it. Not because he thinks he learned something from it that will help them but because than at least somebody remembers the history of the first Cylon war. At times, he wonders, if that book still exists, if there’s a copy of it still left somewhere, or if all of them burned along with the rest of the colonies.) In reality he’d only read it because he hadn’t wanted to disappoint his father not because it was mandatory.

Admiral Ngala wrote that by the time the war ended one in four Viper pilots was dead.

He remembers sitting there in class that day, in the second row, and looking around, staring at all of his classmates, just like everyone else was, counting people off by fours. No matter how he counted he always survived because who truly thinks, at that age and even later, that they will be the one who will die? And he remembers wondering if that’s how all those lost Viper pilots in the first war thought: that they wouldn’t be the one to die, until it was all suddenly over. He’d spend his time, which might sound odd, counting his classmates off by fours, and rearranging everything in such a way that he and his friends were always amongst the survivors. He hadn’t understood then, none of them had really, that you’d have no control over it, that it was all just a simple act of faith, that he could live and his neighbor could die and there was nothing they could do about it.

He remembers thinking that it didn’t matter, the war was over and they were all safe.

But he still sat there, dividing everyone up in such a way that he and his friends would survive. And he thinks about all those Viper pilots who survived the first war and he wonders, briefly, if any of them even knew each other before the war started and whether any of that even maters.

*~*

He’s their commanding officer, the one they look to for all the answers, the one whose lead their supposed to follow.

And yet, despite the time that has passed, he still can’t quite remember all of their names, and he still mixes up their faces.

It wasn’t like this in the before, he’d known all the ones he used to fly with, and he’d known the ones that were here on the Galactica in the beginning, but they’d all died in a blaze of glory. Now the new faces blur together and he can’t keep them apart, nor does he try because in the end they’ll all die anyway, and whether or not he knew their names won’t help them at all. But he remembers the call-signs of the ones who died, he remembers the details of their last fateful moments, because he is their commanding officer and it is his duty to remember the ones who are lost.

At times he wonders what will happen on the day that he finally dies – because he’s no longer a first year cadet and he no longer believes he’ll be one of the lucky ones. Because if he’s in charge and he’s the only one who remembers them all, when he dies the names of the ones that came before will fade away. Truly he’s got a feeling that by the time they make it to their new home – if they make it at all, he’s never truly believed in earth but surely there must be something out there – there will be nobody left to tell the story, nobody left who knows what happened to all of them. Ngala stated in her book that it was up to the survivors to tell the truth about the war but who will tell it when none of them are there? Because in the end they’ll all be one of those heroic tales, one of those pilots who gave their lives to save everyone else, but there will be nobody left who even remembers their name.

*~*

Admiral Ngala also said that it was the fortunes of war that determine who survives.

He stands and watches all his pilots, whose names and faces blur together, fly out there, to save everyone else. And he thinks, when they return, that their survival doesn’t really matter because tomorrow they’ll go out again, still with as much chance of survival. And he thinks then that Ngala was probably right, because there seems to be no real logic behind any of it. There seems to be no reason why somebody lives or dies because if there was he’s pretty sure the nuggets would have died relatively quickly, but they did not. But then, in all honesty, when he thinks about it, he wonders why he ever thought there would be any logic to it all.

*~*

The first night after the fall of the colonies, when he’s lying in his bunk pretending to be asleep like everyone else – because there is no way that anyone would be able to sleep after all that has happened – Lee thinks about that fateful day in flight school.

He remembers sitting there, looking around, dividing his classmates up into group of fours, like he had any control over what could possibly happen to them. And then the realizes, with a jolt, that of the twenty-nine young cadets that sat there, dividing everyone up into groups off four convinced that they would survive, he’s the only one who’s still alive. Admiral Ngala stated that one in four Viper pilots was dead by the end of the war, which meant that they had a big chance of survival. But to the cadets that sat in that room, to the unfortunate ones that were down on the colonies, all those numbers didn’t matter, because they’re all dead now anyway.

But he lived, somehow, and in all honesty, he’s not sure why he got lucky.

Maybe the book was right when it implied that their survival was all down to chance.

*~*

One day he sits in a briefing, way back in the beginning, among his fellow pilots, and he thinks of their chances and he realizes that if he’s one, and Kara is two, than one of them will be dead by the time this war ends.

(If the war ends at all that is.)

Their survival rate, as it turns out, is less than fifty percent, not that he’s surprised by that.

But still it would be a win-win situation, because either he will live or Kara will, but one of them will still be here.

The truth is of course that the numbers don’t matter, because if he’s one and she’s two, and they fly out together they’ll have a one in two chance that they will live. But if he dies today, Kara will still fly out tomorrow, and there will be another pilot to take his place, and she’ll still have the same chance of survival that she had when she flew out with him.

So in the end their survival rate is extremely low.

Because there’s simply no end to it, unless they suddenly find a habitable planet that is.

*~*

Lee wonders how Admiral Ngala even found out that only one in four Viper pilots was dead.

(What he hadn’t noticed about that book at the time that even though Ngala spoke about all they went through to survive the war there were no names or stories about those that had died. The only stories belonged to the living. At the time it hadn’t mattered but now he thinks that might have been the worst thing about that book.)

She probably took a list of the Viper pilots they had in the beginning, and how many they had left in the end and simply counted. Lee wonders sometimes if it will be the same this time around, if when he lays the list side by side in the end, he’ll find out that only one in four Viper pilots is dead. But then he remembers how many of them there were in the beginning, and he thinks of how dangerous it all is, and all that has happened since then, and he thinks that the truth is that they’re far past that number. He’s not even sure half of them are still alive now, let alone more of them (he’s pretty sure he doesn’t really want to know the numbers.)

Someday, on the off-chance that he makes it to Earth – or wherever they’ll live – he’ll sit down to make a list of how many there were in the beginning, and how many there are left, just to know.

He’s pretty sure, though, that he’s the only one thinking about these things.

*~*

Their survival rate is far _less_ than fifty percent.

(But they have a chance at survival, that’s what they tell the new recruits anyway. It wouldn’t do to scare them off.)

The truth, Lee thinks, lies in what Kara tells him one day, when they’re sitting side by side, drinking to lost pilots and all the people they have forgotten. She said that it didn’t matter how hard they searched for Earth or how beautiful that place would be, none of them would ever see it because by the time they finally reached their new home, they – the pilots – would all be dead by then.

They would be nothing but pictures on the wall, just one more in a long line of dead Viper pilots, only remembered by their fellow pilots until they too died and then their names would fade away, their stories untold.

But Lee still likes to think that if he’s one, and Kara is two, that one of them, at least, will live.


End file.
